Milo #3
Adrian eased him back. Milo’s shoulders hit the sheets and Adrian followed him down, his weight settling over Milo in increments. The sheets pulled loose at the corners.
Adrian’s mouth on his throat. The scrape of his jaw against Milo’s skin.
The glasses bumping Milo’s cheekbone, Adrian reaching up to pull them off and set them on the nightstand by touch, the click of frames against wood.
Then back. His mouth on Milo’s chest, his ribs, his stomach tightening as Adrian’s breath crossed it.
His hands finding the places that made Milo’s breathing come apart: the inside of his hip, the skin below his navel, the line where muscle met tendon at the groin.
Finding them and staying with them, each place given its own attention, Adrian’s hands reading his body the way his hands read a canvas, the way they pressed and tested and returned to the places that responded.
Milo’s hands found the back of Adrian’s neck. His fingers in the close-cropped hair, pulling him closer. Not guiding. Needing. The tremor in both hands, the physiological fact of wanting this much for this long and having it here.
When Adrian’s mouth closed around him, Milo’s hips came off the mattress.
The sheets tore loose at the far corner.
Adrian’s name came out of his mouth, the first syllable clear, the rest lost. Adrian’s hand flat on Milo’s stomach, holding him down, his mouth warm and slow and thorough and devastating in its patience.
Milo’s head pressed back into the pillow and his eyes were closed and his hands were in Adrian’s hair and every empty room in this apartment was full of the sound of his own breathing.
Adrian pulled off before Milo got there. Milo made a sound that was embarrassing and didn’t care. Adrian crawled up his body and kissed him and Milo could taste himself on Adrian’s mouth and his hands went to Adrian’s belt and pulled.
They got the rest of the clothes off with the gracelessness of people whose hands were shaking.
Milo wrapped his hand around Adrian’s cock and Adrian groaned into his neck, his hips pushing forward, and Milo watched his face and saw what his own wanting looked like from the outside: the eyes closing, the mouth falling open, the loss of the composure that Adrian wore so easily everywhere else. Adrian undone by this, by him.
They found a rhythm that built without direction, Adrian’s hand around Milo and Milo’s hand around Adrian, their foreheads pressed together, their breath mixing in the narrow space between their mouths.
The bedframe knocked against the wall, a low rhythmic sound this room had never made.
Adrian’s breath broke against his neck in fragments and Milo’s came apart against Adrian’s shoulder and the rhythm tightened and climbed.
Milo came first, his face pressed into Adrian’s shoulder, his hand gripping the back of Adrian’s neck hard enough that the seams of his own control went, and the shaking went through his whole body in one wave and he said Adrian’s name into Adrian’s skin.
Adrian followed him over seconds later, cum warm between their stomachs, his hand gripping the sheet beside Milo’s head and his whole body going taut and then releasing with a sound Milo felt against his collarbone.
They stayed. Breathing. The bedframe silent. Adrian’s hand on Milo’s stomach, not moving, not asking for anything. The sweat cooling. The room holding them both.
Later. The ceiling of Milo’s apartment.
No crack in the plaster. No character. White, smooth, featureless. He lay on his back and looked at it. The sheets were twisted, half off the mattress, holding the warmth of two bodies and the smell of sweat and underneath it the olive oil on Adrian’s skin.
Adrian’s hand came to his chest. Palm over the heartbeat. His heel against the sternum, covering the place where Milo pressed his own hand when the weight came.
“What’s on your walls at home,” Adrian said.
Milo looked at the ceiling. “Hockey pictures. My sister’s school photos. A calendar my mother put up and never took down. The clock.”
His throat tightened. He pressed the heel of his hand over Adrian’s hand, his palm against Adrian’s knuckles, Adrian’s palm against his chest.
Adrian’s hand stayed. He didn’t push.
“I could bring something,” he said. Palm up, no pull. “A plant. A print. Something.”
The ceiling. The refrigerator hum. The city’s orange through the windows in long rectangles on the floor, reaching the foot of the bed and stopping.
Milo said nothing.
He heard himself not saying it. The offer had been a plant, a print, anything.
Evidence of a person allowed to be here.
A mark on the wall. A color that wasn’t eggshell.
Proof that would be here when Adrian was not, that visitors and teammates and anyone who walked through that door could see and wonder about.
Adrian’s hand stayed on his chest. His breathing slowed and the hand grew heavier with sleep.
Milo lay there looking at the ceiling that held no crack and no nail hole and no shadow.
The garlic smell from the kitchen was already fading.